Greatest Hits

Want to introduce the tools of Depth and Complexity and learn more about your students and introduce the Frame graphic organizer? Have I got the activity for you!

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They’ll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.

No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?

Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.

When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)

Starting with specific examples of fantastic classroom behavior, your class will end up with one sentence summing up their expectations. It’s a classroom motto!

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.